editing notes by Martin Kraemer Liehn, Ph.D. (ul. Shaumnjana 8-2, UKR-04111 Kiev, Tel. +380 044 4490701, Email: lireBabeuf (at) riseup.net)

ATTENTION, this is the
FIRST publication of a major manuscript by

Francois Noel (Graccus) Babeuf.
(probably written 1789-1790).

titled by the author "Essai sur les principes des lois de la NATURE qu’on nomme DROITS NATUREL, des lois reconnues ENTRE LES NATIONS qu’on nomme DROITS DES GENS, des lois CIVILES ou CONVENTIONNELLES entre les hommes réunies en corps de Nation; autre titre Lueurs philosophiques sur ce qu’il y a de reel dans ce qu’on nomme Droits naturel, Droits des Gens, Droit Civil" (capitalised words are underlined in the author’s handwriting).
on the basis of his manuscript RGASPI (Moscow), fond Babeuf, opis 1 delo: 52, pages 1-72back, of which due to political machinations in the archive over the last 5 years 15 manuscript pages are still missing here: 45back and 66ff).

///Volunteers for transcribing the text from manual to electronic format, please come forward! (address for co-ordiantion see above) ///

here are some

Preliminary editorial comments by Martin Kraemer Liehn, Kiev, 9 II 2012


Establishing the author and the time of writing

This 143 pages manuscript has been compiled in a single note-book by François Noel (Graccus) Babeuf (*23 XI 1760 à Saint-Quentin - guillotined, Vendome 27 V 1797). The loose collection of philosophical and political observations was written down most probably during about the first 20 months of the French Revolution (1789-1790) with the author arduously trying to hew out a place for him in the turmoil of post-revolutionary publishing as an author on cadastral reform and numerous day-today- articles.


Material conditions while writing and their imprint on the flow of thoughts

In the meantime, he already partly faced jail time for his zeal to promote class war against the new rich within a revolutionary processes negotiating the new power relation after feudal hegemony on quite unequal material terms. Continuing his pre-revolutionary ambition in philosophical arguments on social change, Babeuf calls his notes “Philosophical glimmers or the real nature of what they call natural rights, international law and civil rights” reserving that they were to be further evolved. So he did, but choosing other forms: editing partly underground populist periodicals, networking for direct revolutionary action. Repression was swift and did not allow for a major philosophical text to be compiled out of these first glimmers.

Babef’s glimmers are social thinking in the making. It is a collection of tentative aphorisms. He tries on different costumes, perspectives. As he tries out different social positions himself, his class rational in political philosophy is wandering and unsteady. Within these first revolutionary months, Babeuf follows ambitions as well provincially as well as in the metropolis with its exorbitant prices and hostility towards the guest from Roye. His economic position is oscillating in a gambling fashion he keeps up against the urgency of a household back in the province where his wife vainly struggles to avoid abject poverty working on the most basic necessities of two children. Babeuf puts up experimental social masquerades and assumes varying rolls in the French Capital Paris within these months of writing and desperately trying to edit an old text in the meantime. So, in his own eyes, he is more than just a flaneur, striding away from domestic responsibilities, he is tentatively entrepreneurial and precariously pleading for the order to wage-labour on the editing of his previous manuscript, “The eternal Cadastre”. While his spleen-like idees-fixes on his former profession, Cadastre administrator for Feudal titles and rights, are liquidated in bargain-value by the revolution, their recycling for the new order proves little rewarding to him personally.
As Babeuf is failing acutely in making his devalued pre-1789 profession into a sly virtue for the new state, he meticulously accumulates on a different pre-1789 activity, his beloved hobby. When Feudal enlighteners still lavished in provincial academy proceedings, he had been able to get favours and moneyed listeners with philosophical high-brow musing on high-flying questions, posed to him by the society of potential Feudal sponsors themselves (most of all in the forms of open calls for essays). Babeuf had some limited success with this self-made educational talk in written (Gracchus BABBEUF. 1961. Correspondance de Babeuf avec l'Academie d'Arras (1785-1788). Marcel Reinhard, ed. Paris: Institut d'histoire de la Révolution française,Presses universitaires de France).

Yet with everything turned upside down, his glimmers reflect his pre-revolutionary passion to produce philosophical self-taught conclusions in the mode of aristocratic Academy procedures only in form. The content goes wild. While Babeuf’s continuously fails in marketing his ready-made provincial wisdom, he tentatively follows different career paths simultaneously. In the newly asserted hegemony of capital only framed by the unfriendly take-over of the dept-ridden old Regime, Babeuf -a former clerk without hard-value capital is bound to venture into a sphere where his say and hand-writing cannot be so easily pushed away as on the publishers’ marketplace.

So, Graccus Babeuf experiments with asserting himself as an authority in the new bourgeois meeting business within temporarily expropriated churches, making a state out of a movement. Yet, again, he over-estimates his own hand-writing and is being seriously challenged for the alleged forging of a signature. While the ensuing legal battle gets him in prison (19 V 1790) and out again, he is - almost simultaneously – actively opposing this increasingly elect business of bourgeois state-crafting. With considerable success, he helps stirring up popular resistance on the new privatization of formerly feudal rights on land-use around his home-town. As in his post-baroque social masquerade, his note-writing is speculative and exploring the limits of representation. At times, he swims with the tide of ultra-Liberalism, then provides its rational to absurdity. Then, he out rightly opposes it.

We actually see sketches of a need-based and democratically planned economy against the business of the market-place. There are theoretical attempts at resistance against the freshly-installed bourgeois hegemony. The spirit of opposing the new order of human relations by the victorious creditors of the king is lively and sharp, much the more because it is actually being developed out of the very fervour of toppling the feudal state within these months of breath-taking collective delving into the realm of previously unknown material possibilities. Babeuf's glimmers speak to us today as a fulminate beginning. Even after the deluge of restoration in the decades to follow, the authors of the Communist Manifesto of 1948 still manage to note Babeuf's further writing as "literature which (...) has (...) given voice to the demands of the proletariat". The glimmers are the first steps Babeuf and his social surrounding discussing social change in the making were able to take in this direction.


Why are we now the first to really trace the revolutionary maturing of Babeuf, while many generations have simply got used to hail him the "first communist" in modern times?

As breathtakingly fresh as his glimmering notebook is the history of its effective occultation during the 217 years to follow. After the breakdown of his revolutionary project and his execution the notebook was subject to speculative trade in written curiosities. French bourgeois proprietors would try to make a fortune from this and 4000 other papers, floating chaotically on the private market with astonishing little effective scientific scrutiny. The lists of sold and bought material compiled by researchers during the 19th century have the double character of market-research and reading interest. In no instance during the barbaric 19th century, material interest to understand the evolution of Babeuf’s proletarian stance 1789-1797 could coincide with the purchase-power to gain access to manuscripts like this. In the remote Danish province of Eckernfoerde, however, for the cautious administrative reformer Lorenz VON STEIN (his 1842 book “Der Sozialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreich” claimed Babeuf to be the first Communist which had some influence on the reception by Karl Marx). Though appreciated as a label, categorized authoritarian, opposed by Kropotkin to libertarian Communists etc, all this 19th century reception could draw on surprisingly little source material actually giving evidence about the evolution of Babeuf’s sinking from first hand. In the second half of the 1920s this was to change abruptly. In a concerted financial effort by the young Soviet Union it effectively strove to inherit the legacy of the modern Social Revolution since its French breakthrough 1789. Until the early 1930s almost 4000 single documents either written by Babeuf or related to his agency were bought up at various auctions in France and transported to the newly-founded Institute for Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet capital Moscow.

The early 1930s were not a very fortunate period for helping to evaluate the experimental and tentative potential of social thinking accompanying Babeuf’s agency in a viral bourgeois revolution. As George Orwell said, in these years even an English worker could hardly open his mouth without uttering a heresy to Marxism-Leninism as it was forged by state-science in the Soviet Union. The whirling thought of Babeuf in “glimmers”, prefiguring proletarian contestation in certain instants and then contradicting them blankly, masquerading with old feudal forms under new bourgeois hegemony of thought. This was not the sort of historical material the young generation of Marxist-Leninist researchers needed to secure their position. This dead-lock somewhat changed only in the late Khrushchevian years, when a regular research group established itself in the Institute hosting the glimmers to engage in an international exchange between East and West on the agency and legacy of Babeuf. Their French-speaking counterpart dedicated to “Robespierreian studies” under the auspices of the French communist party could never quite get out of the shadow of their Moscow fellow-collective. So, up to 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian language edition of Babeuf (BABJOF, G. 1975-1977. Sochinenija v 4-h tomah. Moskva: Nauka.) figures still 3 volumes ahead of the French one, ie. 4:1.


Interestingly, in the foreword to the first volume, the editors, among them V. M. Daline, gave a somewhat flawed reason why not to include “glimmers” in this 4-volume project. “It cannot be said how much of the thoughts expressed in this notebook are of his own.” Only several decades later, in the perestroika-year of 1987, Daline made a somewhat more courageous effort of communicating on his reading in glimmers. In the French edition “Presence de Babeuf” he gives us a clear juxtaposition of the previous statement (Victor DALINE. 1987. [translated from Russian by Jean Champenois] Gracchus Babeuf à la veille et pendant la reevolution franccaise, 1785-1794, 267-300).

Now, according to Daline’s master-narrative entitled by monopoly access to the source, this collection is highly original and has wide philosophical bases reaching over Rousseau into the very making of 18th century French materialism. For Daline, however, caution is still the master of the day in 1987, and the late researcher takes to a method highly prolific in his youth when communicating about a historic text of cardinal significance but not letting others have a read. In the following, scholarly talk on Babeuf, sometimes hitting on Daline’s talk about glimmers would hit a short-lived speculative bubble. On this peak of interest 1989, fostering Babeuf’s scholarly commemoration, the bicentennial pretext for talking French revolution East and West of the Iron curtain seemed to provide sufficiently feullitonist raw-material for ready-made explanations and prophecies within the move towards bourgeois hegemony occurring in the Eastern hemisphere (we find four second-hand-only references to Lueurs in: Claude Mazauric, Alain Maillard, Eric Walter, ed. 1994 (real date of publication April 1995). Presence de Babeuf Lumieres revolution communisme , actes du colloque international Babeuf Amiens les 7 8 et 9 decembre 1989. Paris: Publications De La Sorbonne and Association pour le colloque international Babeuf, 31, 74, 107, 158). This little gold rush of digging topical aspects out of Babeuf( among them the name of a reeducation camp in Vietmnam - a fruit of French students being culturally coerced into excessive reading of "Le Monde" and its cheap techniques of updating old stereotypes), no matter how limited in access to original texts, was, strangely enough, also the burial proceedings of scholarly interest.


Re-discovery of the original hand-writing 2007 and some interesting first reactions (http://belarus.indymedia.org/11303)

On 16th of November 2007, I did a routine check of the inventory of Babeuf. Presenting my deportation from Russian territory by political police (which came to effect just some months later, http://www.archive.org/details/SiberianDiary), I wanted to make sure, not to leave one of the big treasuries of Social revolutionary thought undug (the fond of Louise Michel has just as many surprises in stall, I discovered). To my amazement, there was no microfilm retrievable to delo 52, the “Glimmers”, though the high-profiled personal collection of Babeuf with an entire former Soviet research group tied to its exploit is actually entirely micro-filmed otherwise. After some hesitation, the current RGASPI hierarchy came forth with letting me look at the hard-copy from a minimum 2 metres distance (that is why the press release reproduces the error in deciphering made by the archives administration, reading “lumiere” instead of “lueurs”. A quick survey brought to light the following: the working group of with Daline was in November 2007 amlmost entirely dispersed. Together with the help of G. A. Bagaturija we managed to contact close aquatances of a last survivor, now on her pension in Israel who could not make a statement on the Babeuf manuscript due to her advanced age and general confusion. To come closer to a verified answer to the question why Babeuf’s “glimmers” remained hidden for such a long time in Soviet science we therefore need written sources from the decision-making process inside and for the working group. Oral sources seem to be unable to contribute to this. And a second tendency impressed me: very few people had worked with Babeuf collection in Moscow at all. One of the more ardent readers of the widely unpublished material according to the archive's register, had a secret telephone number, I found out when I just wanted to give him a call. It turned out to be the director of Putin’s strategic think-tank “Centre for Strategic Studies”. It turned out from unofficial sources within the archive, that he investigates resistance to the reaction rolling back the progress of the French Revolution with a fervor suggesting strong parallels with his very own job in post-perestroika-Russia, always with a focus on pacifying resistance in the working classes both in 19th century France and 21st century Russia. Reactions from other continents of oligarchic hegemony were quite as telling. From the US, I got a curious urge to figure out whether this manuscript mentioned Machiavelli in any instance, as discourse analysis had somehow suggested a hype for making the Machiavelli-lineage talk (Lenin never cited Machiavelli, why? and related speculations on a contracting market for historiographic sophisms).


A legathy to be lived up to, globally, collectively
As I tried to point on the day after my discovery in 2007, Babeufs glimmers are highly relevant for todays struggle against capitalism and its state institutions. Academia is in most part not up to the task, so we have to give into people’s hands what’s theirs, finally. Please let me know how this account sounds to you. Volunteer for transcription, help make this web-site known. Promote copyriot for the sake of revolutionary legathy. Make the searching of Babeuf get some sense after 222 years of idling of these words in isolation! .

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